For today’s IT professional, the iPad is an addition, not a replacement

It has shortcomings, but the iPad is worth more to a sysadmin than you'd think.

It may not replace everything, but the iPad belongs in an IT professional's tool belt.

Photograph by Nathan Mattise

When I think about the iPad as a sysadmin's tool, I don't think about it in terms of can/can't. Obviously, the iPad can be a sysadmin tool. Heck, I used Windows Mobile 6 phones as sysadmin tools. It wasn’t a lot of fun, but if you were really far from a laptop, tin cans with string, or a sharp stick and soft dirt, you could do it. Prior to getting my first iPad, I used my iPhone to some effect. The truth is you can use an iPhone (or really, any smartphone) as a sysadmin tool as long as you have a decent Web browser and few key apps. But it is not a particularly enjoyable experience.

Yes, I know, “sysadmin” and “enjoyable” seem like they’re mutually exclusive. The small screen of the iPhone, and the small size of its keyboard have always made it one of those “if you have to" tools. Things like VNC or other similar remote logins were... well, you can do those sorts of things on an iPhone, but I always tried to avoid it. It’s easier to drive home to the MacBook Pro than use the iPhone.

The iPad, on the other hand, is quite enjoyable to use for sysadmin tasks. For one, the size is just about perfect. It’s big enough that even my ape-like paws can type at a reasonable speed, manipulate screen elements, etc. It’s not so big that you can’t easily carry it, but it’s big enough that you can wedge it into a rack or prop it up on a CD tray so the display is easily accessible. I find a decent flashlight app is just perfect for illuminating tiny, hard-to-read serial numbers, but it’s not so big that you can’t work with it in the limited space behind a typical rack in a small server room. Don’t get me wrong, I love my 17” MacBook Pro and am definitely a fan of that beast. But there are times when it’s just too big for the situation and an iPhone is too small. The iPad’s superior battery life is also of no small comfort when you’re in a situation where you won’t be able to plug the device into AC power for some time. Naturally, you never have an AC adapter and power cord when you need one (I swear, there’s a wall space full of them, all giggling at my frustration).

The iPad—as hardware

While I have a solid collection of tools on my iPad, the real advantage isn’t what it runs. It’s the way the size and form contribute to how I use it. For example, it’s much easier to take notes on an iPad than an iPhone. Siri is nice, but being able to use the “real” interface for my helpdesk Web UI instead of their rather odd mobile version? Much nicer. Mail on the iPad is actually a better app than Mail on Mac OS, especially when paired with a decent set of server-side rules. Sure, there’s an iPhone client for things like WebEx and Adobe Connect for the various impromptu meetings I have to be a part of. But the advantage of the iPad’s screen size is inarguable in those situations. If I need to wedge it up against a wall or in a rack, I can do that and still be able to see the screen clearly, even from bit of a distance. The iPhone is smaller, but reading that screen from a meter or more away is not easy.

When I’m looking at things like data charts in Cacti or service status in Nagios, the ability of the iPad to display multiple items at a readable size means I spend less effort reading and more of my time analyzing. The less time I spend acquiring data, the more time I have for other things. The analysis is going to take the same amount of time regardless of how long I need to gather the data. If I can speed up that part of the process (and rather a lot of sysadmin needs are getting and analyzing data), I get done sooner. The iPad may not have things like SD card slots, but I've had devices with those things. Other than cameras, I find the implementations of SD cards to be so poor that not having them hasn’t been an actual problem for me. Besides, I have a good wireless network. Do I really want to deal with small, easily lost, hard-to-label bits of plastic? No I do not.

Finally, when I’m doing my “IT by walking around” thing, the iPad is a better tool than any other I’ve had. It's less awkward than a laptop, and more functional than a phone. If someone is having a problem, I can SSH into their Mac or remote into their Windows machine while they’re having the problem in front of me. Being able to troubleshoot the problem as it’s happening instead of trying to duplicate it hours or days later is a huge advantage.

While the apps available on the platform are indeed important, it is the platform itself that makes all the difference. Even when I worked in a mostly Windows network, I still ran things from a Mac—the platform just gave me more capability than traditional Wintel. The design of the iPad, both the physical device and iOS, has been the major factor in it moving from an adjunct to a tool I rely on almost as much as my MacBook Pro.

So the iPad itself is great, but face it—you need apps too. What apps are of use to a sysadmin in this case? Well, let’s walk through my day a bit.

The iPad (and apps) in daily workflow

First, there’s the obligatory “While laptop is starting and logging in” checks. When I first started in this business, monitoring networks meant really expensive platform-specific programs, or worse, dedicated hardware that could cost tens of thousands of dollars. Neither worked well outside of a narrow range of very expensive hardware. Now? Pretty much any server or device on my network can be monitored via SNMP. For that, all I need is a Web browser. I log into our internal IT landing page and log into Nagios and Cacti, and via some custom views, make sure that things are running OK. All of this is done via HTML. No Java needed. Within a few minutes, I can check on servers across the country, not only for up/down settings, but to see if critical services are edging from “OK” to “not OK.” Nothing more than Safari needed.

If anything gets to the warning/critical stage, I get e-mails on it. Barring nothing actually being wrong or needing changing, I can really run most of my day on Safari and Mail with ease. And when things need to be updated or changed? The answer really depends on what we’re talking about.

Prompt is here to handle all your SSH needs... well, promptly.

If the server/desktop in question is a Mac or Linux box, I can get a lot done over SSH. For that, Prompt from Panic is awesome. Cabel and the gang really looked not just at making an SSH client, but one that is designed to work well on an iPad. Would I write an extensive shell or python script on an iPad? Probably not. There are things like large-scale typing that I just personally hate to do on a flat piece of glass. Fortunately, most of my SSH interactions are short commands and watching logs scroll. In terms of server support, there’s very little I can’t do on my iPad.

At worst this should be generic tablet instead of an iPad, that alone skews it towards fanboism.Either way, that aside, sounds like very limited sysadmin functionality, given the price.Completely useless for managing Windows Servers because of lack of mouse input, and very limited use for managing unix/linux devices, due to touch keyboard being absolutely horrible for anything requiring typing of more than 5 words.Either way sounds like another rationalization of a tablet purchase, since these devices are still content consumption devices, no matter how much proof of concept things are shown. You could, but why, when there are proper tools for each type of work?

^ I find I use my (android) tablet + logmein *all the time* while I'm working at the datacenter. I have my laptop with me too, of course, but a second screen that I can use as a remote-video device has helped my productivity more than I'd expected.

I'm confused, you're fine with ssh access to linux/macs, but you're not fine with that to routers and firewalls? How does that even make sense? If you are using anything but ssh to do configuration/management work on your router/fierwall you are playing with fire, and you WILL get burned.

My new favorite tool is Mobile PC Monitor. You can buy it SaaS or you can buy an enterprise version and host it yourself. It has an agent that installs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X systems that provides full monitoring, services, connectivity, drive space, logs, etc. It also allows you to perform functions on the system such as reboot, shutdown, etc. They have other control modules for Exchange (lets you see and manipulate mail queues, etc.), AD (create users, lock and unlock accounts, reset passwords, change group membership, etc.), VMWare (mostly monitoring) and recently MSSQL (start jobs, read logs even run queries.) You can do all of this from your iPhone, iPad, Android or Win Phone 7.

I know it sounds like an advertisement, but honestly, I'm just a very satisfied customer.

As a sysadmin with several decades of experience, IMHO the most important feature of a tool is open architecture. I don't have the luxury of supporting some platforms and not others so a more hardware agnostic approach for this article might have been wise. The term tablet would have been more appropriate (especially since sysadmins will more likely read this).

As for the iPad, tried it... Having to plug a computer into a computer to activate it isn't my idea of a good way to start. It's a quality piece of hardware (the 2's build quality was lacking compared to the original) but being trapped in Apple's walled garden is a non-starter to me. Can't afford to have to re-activate by going back to my desktop 15 floors down.

Moved on to the Asus transformer. The SDK makes it easy to write apps for my own use but the widescreen thing makes it a bit more unwieldy than the iPad. The keyboard also makes it way too heavy to drag around but it's great for travel with it's 20+ hour (active) battery life... I'd still rather use my laptop though (speed and the flexibility of being able to run both Windows and Linux rule the day most days).

So what do tablet do I use? I'm still buying a new one every 6 months or so until I find one that's ready for prime time. Presently, last November I found a Dopo (double power... funny name) capacitive touch 7" at W**mart for $140. It fits in my back pocket, runs for 5 (active) hours and if I drop/break/lose it, who cares about $140. After all, it's just a tool not an investment. There are an increasing number of these on the market and for a tool, methinks sub $150 and 7" portability is the price point that will make tablets ubiquitous in the admin game.

Not a horribly fanboi article, but the Samsung Series 7 Tablet absolutely kills the iPad as a business / admin tool. I'm actually less knocking the article and more saying, I would love to see a feature on the Samsung S7 tablet as a tool. So it is 150% the cost of an iPad. So what, as a business tool, if I were in the market to spend $800 on an iPad, kicking in the extra $400 for the Series 7 would be trivial, especially once you factor in the fact that cellular connectivity over the course of 1-2 years completely levels out the pricing scale. That is to say, the TCO numbers begin to converge after about a year when you consider the total always available cellular access costs and the cost of buying all the programs you would need for the iPad.

The time saved alone by connecting to a company share and just installing all the of the same tools you use on your desktop instead of searching for new ones and figuring them out pays off the $400 price tag difference for most time constrained network admins. Add in the ability to administer the device and join to a domain, and for the network admin you have a clean deal.

I use an HP Slate 500 right now, and it is amazingly perfectly suited to my needs for network administration. The biggest bonus is I don't have to do any searching around for tools which meet my needs. I use the exact same tools I use on my desktop. SonicWall VPN, puTTY or ZOC Terminal, VMware vSphere client, RDP, WinVNC, LogMeIn, Ammyy Admin, Outlook / Office, ConnectWise, various password safes, Windows shares... it all just works.

Even the USB key I keep with a nice plethora of PortableApps.com programs just plugs in and works without any thought needed.

Even ignoring WinRT ARM slates due out in the next few months, the next run of x86 i5 and Atom powered slates coming out for Windows 8 are something extraordinary to look forward to. Every OEM has the magic 8-10 hour battery cycle and 2 lb weight target in their cross hairs.

Frankly now is a time to wait and see what is on the horizon for the late summer / fall releases. Investing in a top end tablet now is a losing proposition. Best bet for those losing patience is to spend in the sub-$300 range getting something x86 off eBay and figuring out all the good versus bad use cases so you know what you want in a few months when the next generation hits. For example, I haven't met anyone who has used an active digitizer stylus on a daily basis with a Windows tablet who would ever go back to capacitive only screens. They all love the flexibility of using both interchangeably.

For all it's shortcomings in my view, I might still try out WinRT... maybe even on an iPad, since I have a feeling there is a strong possibility of a hacked port coming to the platform. I would have to see something with drivers though for at least one of the dongle IR based styli first though. Windows / Office pen and inking support is unbeatable otherwise.

I'm glad to see all the true active stylus hardware which 3rd parties have released for the iPad, but it sickens me that Apple is so anti-stylus, that the hardware is only supported by a minute handful of apps. Seriously, what kind of hate spawns that kind of limitation on good hardware. Just add an api hook to let the various styli dongles act as a precise finger touch device for every other app and reject capacitive touch as a palm rejection. This is not an unreasonable compromise for hardware makers who are trying to make the iPad a competitive alternative to active digitizer tablets, and thus increase Apple's sales.

I find my Galaxy Note is a even better size the things you're talking about in this article. It's huge enough that you get the viewability but still small enough to stuff in a pocket. For the same reason it's also easier to one hand if necessary.

Prompt is still not a good ssh client for a SysAdmin, doesn't do port forwarding. Both the iPad and the iPhone have RDP clients, and I've used them on both devices, tunnelled over an SSH connection from iSSH to remotely admin Windows machines.

Not editing configuration files admin, but clearing queues and restarting services is all fairly doable. The only problem with doing it on the iPhone is it can be tricky to scroll around the screen if you have a long menu list to select from, but many of the things you want to do have command line equivalents or keyboard shortcuts these days, not too bad.

I have many co-workers who own ipads and they do little more than check their emails and play games(or fiddle with apps that are not work related) on them. To me- the ipad seems more like an expensive toy than some sort of work-device.

I use it when I'm working on my motorbike, my iBooks has a 230 page (A4 sized) workshop manual and 60 pages (A3 sized) of schematic diagrams for my bike, fully searchable, and with a clickable table of contents, and annotation system.

And the browser works plenty good enough for googling stuff that isn't in the official manual.

Best of all, I've got the same thing on my iPhone incase I break down on the side of the road without the iPad.

Another benefit over a notebook/netbook is oil/dust/etc can easily be cleaned off an iPad (just a bit of detergent and a moist cloth). Can't do that with anything that's got a keyboard.

My iPad 1 has been a handy supplemental device as a sys/network admin, but there is no way in hell it's a replacement.

The vSphere app, Cisco VPN, various RDP and remote monitoring apps that are available make it a little easier to see WTF is going on quickly and allow me the ability to jump in and fix something in a pinch. However, it's rare that I am not near a machine that would allow fully functional access, so in all honesty, the iPad is really more of a "read only" tool for business as it applies to me. It can help let me know when shit's going pear shaped so I can get to a real machine to fix the problem.

Granted.. this is my personal iPad that I occasionally use for work. In reality, it's pretty evenly 50/50 when it comes to using it for work and personal uses (IE games).

Personally I use my iPad frequently as an admin tool.Jump desktop, while on the expensive side, is an excellent RDP/VNC app.There are others that work well too. I would imagine there is a market for admin apps but it is really unnecessary. With the iPad or any tablet that has a good RDP client it is essentially a mobile terminal that can easily be used to solve any problem that you would do on a laptop. Having cellular access only makes it better for the admin on the go.

For scripting reasons or development purposes it works great with a Bluetooth (or USB if you have the camera adapter) keyboard.

And just to nitpick the article a little. Windows doesn't have a rich command line environment? Clearly you are not familiar with Powershell which is arguably the most feature rich shell environment on the market.

Can we please have a moratorium on "fanboi", "fanboy," and its other variants? You may have had some very interesting things to say in the remaining 7 or so paragraphs in your post, but I'll never know, because as soon as I see "fanboi," I stop reading.

I'm a little weirded out as to why this had to be an "iPad" article. Maybe it should have been over in Infinite Loop.

There's nothing about an iPad that makes it a better choice over an Android tablet or a Windows tablet - and in some ways (depending on which one) it's not as good.

Consider, with a Transformer Prime and its dock, you can plug wired ethernet connectors using stock USB ethernet devices. Same for serial ports and many other devices. Heck, I can even plug a USB hard drive into mine with the drive formatted as NTFS and it works... no iTunes needed.

Since Android can have multitasking background apps, it can be used to watch for events even while sleeping.

And of course, a Windows tablet (which can be had for $600-ish if you don't need the pen) can do all of that far more since it's a full OS without restrictions - you can run you fave network analysers on that tablet.

Then there's form factors. There are many 7" Android devices which are much more convenient to carry around for impromptu emergencies... some are even phones.

I'm not saying the iPad isn't a good choice per se, but clearly it's not the ONLY one - and in some ways, not even the best one. It would have been nicer to read an article that looked at either all the options - or stuck to the bigger picture view without discussing specific brands or models.

In our environment, we use smartcards as part of the 2FA setup. Until I see a tablet computer with a smartcard reader in it, it will never be a viable tool for me. It'd be a little closer if it could run PowerShell, but it's still not close enough to be a real tool.

More than that, I don't think I'd want to run a network from a tablet. I work so much more efficiently with my dual monitors and ability to read from one screen while I do it on the other. Or do it on one screen while taking notes on the other. Screen real estate on a tablet is lacking and it's going to effect your efficiency. More than that, I think Nagios and Cacti are the real tools in your article, not the iPad. You're using the iPad as a data delivery device, nothing more. My Kindle Fire can look at Nagios and Cacti graphs.

If anything, I think your article goes more to show why open source isn't as effective as it could be. Why isn't there an app for your phone that can present the data you're looking for in a meaningful way? Why can't you develop phone sized graphs in Cacti and Nagios?

I'm a little weirded out as to why this had to be an "iPad" article. Maybe it should have been over in Infinite Loop.

There's nothing about an iPad that makes it a better choice over an Android tablet or a Windows tablet - and in some ways (depending on which one) it's not as good.

The iPad is the most popular tablet computer on the shelves by some margin and this was an analysis about how effective it is at estate management, including how its hardware and software ecosystem fare.

For other tablets, the hardware is directly comparable, but certain software products might not be available for other platforms, so writing an article saying that any generic tablet is either good at managing other networks or not based on reviewing one platform is just making a bunch of sweeping statements. Ars chose to publish an article focusing on the most used tablet hardware-and-software stack; just get over it.

I'm sure if you want to do the same analysis with a reasonably popular, alternative tablet stack that Ars may print your story.

As for the iPad, tried it... Having to plug a computer into a computer to activate it isn't my idea of a good way to start.

"Hi, I haven't used iOS in at least 18 months but I'll tell you all about what's wrong with it today. Also, even though I've got all manner of computer access, having to use one once is *really annoying*!"

Quote:

Can't afford to have to re-activate by going back to my desktop 15 floors down.

"Another problem I have is that various traumas I've had with Windows over the years seem to bleed over in my dreams to other platforms after a while. I see BSOD's on my Kindle, I tell you!"

Seriously, "re-activate" an iPad? What are you doing, desoldering the flash memory chips?

In our environment, we use smartcards as part of the 2FA setup. Until I see a tablet computer with a smartcard reader in it, it will never be a viable tool for me. It'd be a little closer if it could run PowerShell, but it's still not close enough to be a real tool.

More than that, I don't think I'd want to run a network from a tablet. I work so much more efficiently with my dual monitors and ability to read from one screen while I do it on the other. Or do it on one screen while taking notes on the other. Screen real estate on a tablet is lacking and it's going to effect your efficiency. More than that, I think Nagios and Cacti are the real tools in your article, not the iPad. You're using the iPad as a data delivery device, nothing more. My Kindle Fire can look at Nagios and Cacti graphs.

If anything, I think your article goes more to show why open source isn't as effective as it could be. Why isn't there an app for your phone that can present the data you're looking for in a meaningful way? Why can't you develop phone sized graphs in Cacti and Nagios?

Smart Card reader on a tablet? You seek the Fujitsu Stylistic Q550. The Q550 is Atom based and very compact. Probably the best model at the moment. 10.1", 1.5 lbs, 5-8 hr run time, 1280x800, 2 GB RAM, swappable battery, etc... It is a year old though. Not the greatest Atom CPU on board.

The older ST5xxx series are about the size or an ultrabook, husky at 3 lbs., but also tended to offer several hardware authentication methods like smart cards and fingerprint readers. They run about $250-350 used on eBay with accessories. They are more of a laptop alternative for the inking or art inclined than compact tablet. Definitely way cheaper than a Wacom Cintiq for the art types though.

I think an x86 netbook is a better solution for on-the-go. If you manage Windows networks, you install Windows on it. If you run Linux or other Unix networks, you install that OS on your netbook.

Just don't say that a touch based keyboard is easier to use than the one in the netbook.

+1

Combined with a SSD and large capacity battery - you may end up with slightly more bulk. But IMO the advantages are worth it. But I get how the iPad can simply be more 'accessible' for quick and simple operations.

I guess I am confused as to why a tablet is needed in addition to the rest of the tools. I replaced my desktop with a touch-enabled e6400 and now I am mobile and I didn't spend and additional $500+. Is a 7lb laptop really that much bulk to carry around for network admins? And the added bonus is you don't have to prop it up to read it on a server rack shelf.